A self-taught Yorkshire carpenter’s son spent forty years building four increasingly precise sea clocks to solve a navigation problem that was killing sailors by the thousands, and won a £20,000 prize from Parliament equivalent to approximately £4 million today, but had to be personally supported by King George III before the astronomers who dominated the prize committee would agree to pay him

The problem was longitude. For most of the age of sail, mariners could determine their latitude, or north-south position, straightforwardly enough by measuring the height of the noonday sun above the horizon. Longitude, the east-west position, was substantially harder. It required knowing precisely what time it was at a fixed reference point on land, and [...] The post A self-taught Yorkshire carpenter’s son spent forty years building four increasingly precise sea clocks to solve a navigation pr